The HTC EVO Design 4G is a comfortable world phone that offers solid performance and 4G speeds at a good price.

The HTC EVO Design 4G is a great affordable smartphone for Sprint. At $99.99 with a two-year contract, it's the second 4G smartphone on Sprint to launch for less than $100, though some older 4G phones now cost less than $100 up front. But the EVO Design is a significant step up from most of those phones—it's one of the best 4G smartphones you can buy on Sprint, and the price is just a bonus.

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Design and Call QualityThe Design is a black slab that measures 4.5 by 2.4 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.6 ounces. It's made of a mixture of black aluminum and soft-touch plastic and looks unassuming. The real focus is on the gorgeous 4-inch, 540-by-960-pixel (qHD) capacitive LCD touch screen, which looks incredibly sharp and crisp. There are four capacitive touch buttons beneath the screen. Typing on HTC's on-screen QWERTY keyboard was easy in both portrait and landscape modes, thanks to its well-tuned haptic feedback and predictive text algorithm.

The Design 4G is a CDMA/WiMAX phone that runs on Sprint's 3G and 4G networks. It's also a GSM/EDGE 2G quad-band world phone (GSM 850/900/1800/1900). There's also 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, so it'll work anywhere you want, as long as you don't mind the roaming rates. Running Ookla's Speedtest.net app, I saw 4G download speeds up to 7.5Mbps down, which is impressive. They averaged closer to 5.5Mbps, which is still very good. Like all Sprint 4G devices, the Design is capped at 1.5 Mbps for 4G uploads. The Design can be used as a Wi-Fi hotspot to provide network access to up to eight devices with the proper plan.

Reception was good, but call quality was just mediocre. Voices sound clear in the earpiece, but extremely thin, bordering on hollow. On the other end, calls made with the phone are easy to understand, with average noise cancellation, but voices sound a bit robotic. The speakerphone sounds much like the earpiece—clear but thin—and doesn't go loud enough to use outdoors. Calls sounded better over a Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129, 4.5 stars), and voice dialing worked fine over Bluetooth without training. Battery life was average. With 4G turned off, the phone pulled in 5 hours 41 minutes of talk time.

Performance and AppsThe phone is powered by a single-core 1.2 GHz Qualcomm MSM8655 processor, which makes for solid—though strictly midrange—performance. Our benchmarks show that the Design should be ready for most common tasks, but gamers should look for something dual-core, like the Motorola Photon 4G ($199.99, 4.5 stars).

About the Author

Alex Colon is the managing editor of PCMag's consumer electronics team. He previously covered mobile technology for PCMag and Gigaom.
Though he does the majority of his reading and writing on various digital displays, Alex still loves to sit down with a good, old-fashioned, paper and ink book in his free time. (Not that there's anything wrong wit... See Full Bio

HTC EVO Design 4G (Sprint)

HTC EVO Design 4G (Sprint)

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